Watch: A film on stamps will make you think twice about turning down Diwali tip requests

Many of us don’t send letters any more unless they are to the Income Tax Department, but we like to look at the small pieces of paper that are stuck to the left hand side of the envelopes. Stamp love will surely endure the changing ways in which Indians engage with its vast and highly efficient postal system. Anirban Dutta’s A Tale of Stamps, one of many documentaries that will be screened at the Open Frame film festival organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in Delhi, explores the history of Indian philately through interviews with employees of India Post, historians, philatelists and stamp designers. The PSBT production includes a sequence that lays bare the challenges faced by postal employees in the remote corners of India. India Post has 1, 55,000 post offices across the country. In many places, the post office is “the only outpost of the government which is visible”, says Kaveree Banerjee, Secretary, Department of Post. This sequence from the Sunderban delta region in West Bengal might just make you think twice before complaining about tipping postmen at the time of Diwali.